(This is another is a series of articles
I wrote for The Master’s Artist.)
In
Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender (played by
Owen Wilson) desperately wants to live in Paris of the 1920s, the city and time
of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso,
Salvador Dali, Cole Porter and Josephine Baker. And he gets his wish, if only
for a few hours each night at midnight. In one scene, he climbs into a taxi and
finds T.S. Eliot, and he
says that “Prufrock” is like his mantra, but where he comes from in Hollywood,
people measure out their lives in coke spoons, not coffee spoons.
If
you don’t know the poem, you miss the reference. In the poem, Eliot wrote, “I
have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
“The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, when Eliot
was all of 27, and it is still considered by many critics and scholars to be
the most influential poem of the 20th century. It’s difficult to
imagine any poem today having the kind of impact that “Prufrock” did. Published
by Poetry with the urging of Ezra Pound, the poem played a major role in
shaping and defining Modernism in poetry and literature generally.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against
the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
The
poem is longish, unfolding a series of scenes that seem unrelated. Scholars
still argue about the subject and meaning of the poem, but it is clearly a poem
about the disconnectedness of modern society and man’s disconnected place
within that society. In that sense, it is as contemporary today as it was in
1915.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon
the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on
the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of
the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in
drains…
Eliot
uses a combination of rhyme, free verse and repetition. The reader happens upon
the rhyme but is soon swept away from it, only to return suddenly to it.
There’s nothing predictable here, no planet in its orbit or star in its galaxy.
But there are delightful lines, including some of the most famous in 20th
century poetry:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
When
I was in high school, Eliot’s poetry always posed a problem – should it be
taught in American literature (junior year) or English literature (senior
year)? My school solved the problem by teaching Eliot in both years. In
American literature, we learned “The Hollow Men” – This is the way the world ends, / Not with a bang but a whimper. In
senior year, it was “Prufrock” and the poems published as Four Quartets. (I
still have the paperback edition of Four
Quartets published for 95 cents in 1968; underlined in many places with
margin notes in my own handwriting.)
“Prufrock”
was written more than two decades before Eliot embraced the Christian faith.
And yet the sense of a broken world and broken people permeate it. In an odd
way, to read it now is to see the poem anticipating the intellectual and
spiritual frame of mind of the poet that would eventually lead the poet to
faith.
Eliot
might smile at that. Despite all of the scholarly hubbub about the themes and
meanings of his poems, all he himself said was that he simply wanted people to
read his poetry.
There
are various recordings of Eliot reading the poem, and you can find these at
YouTube, but one of the best I’ve come across is the reading by Spoken Verse,
which allows you to follow the words as they are read.
Photograph by Vince Mig via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
I first came across this poem as a young teenager at Grammar School. It was in the text book we were using for English Literature but was not one of the poems we ever studied.
ReplyDeleteI fell in love with it at first reading and my feelings have never changed...
What an amazing work! I remember in college writing a paper on "Murder in the Cathedral." Man! What an amazing writer T. S. Eliot was!
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Glynn!
Prufock has stuck to me and comes up in random places. Just the other day I said "Do I dare to each a peach?" and my children got excited because they thought I brought home peaches from the market. When I am old I will wear my trousers rolled. Thanks Glynn!
ReplyDelete